Stefano Costa

Win32 Native Server
This is the first PostgreSQL release to natively run on Microsoft Windows as a server. It can run as a Windows service. This release supports NT-based Windows releases like Win2000, XP, Win2003. Older releases like Windows 95, 98, and ME are not supported because these operating systems do not have the infrastructure to support PostgreSQL. A separate installer project has been created to ease installation on Windows: http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller.

Although tested throughout our release cycle, the Windows port does not have the benefit of years of use in production environments that PostgreSQL has on Unix platforms and therefore should be treated with the same level of caution as you would a new product.

Savepoints allow specific parts of a transaction to be aborted without affecting the remainder of the transaction. Prior releases had no such capability; there was no way to recover from a statement failure within a transaction except by aborting the whole transaction. This feature is valuable for application writers who require error recovery within a complex transaction.
Point-In-Time Recovery

Though PostgreSQL is very reliable, in previous releases there was no way to recover from disk drive failure except to restore from a previous backup or use a standby replication server. Point-in-time recovery allows continuous backup of the server. You can recover either to the point of failure or to some transaction in the past.
Tablespaces

Tablespaces allow administrators to select the file systems used for storage of tables, indexes, and entire databases. This improves performance and control over disk space usage. Prior releases used initlocation and manual symlink management for such tasks.
Improved Buffer Management, CHECKPOINT, VACUUM

This release has a more intelligent buffer replacement strategy, which will make better use of available shared buffers and improve performance. The performance impact of vacuum and checkpoints is also lessened.
Change Column Types

A column’s data type can now be changed with ALTER TABLE.
New Perl Server-Side Language

A new version of the plperl server-side language now supports a persistent shared storage area, triggers, returning records and arrays of records, and SPI calls to access the database.
Comma-separated-value (CSV) support in COPY

COPY can now read and write comma-separated-value files. It has the flexibility to interpret non-standard quoting and separation characters too.